Last week I posted about environmental practitioners\u00a0 limiting their opinions to the areas in which they have expertise.\u00a0 From there I went off on a little rant about the importance of consultants providing data to prove their conclusions and predictions.\u00a0\u00a0 Today’s little lecture is on the importance of scientific results being reproducible.\u00a0 Reproducibility is a bedrock scientific principle.<\/p>\n
When scientists talk about reproducibility, they are not talking about the nocturnal habits of our species.\u00a0 Instead they are referring to the ability of two scientists to be able to conduct the same experiment and come up with the same result.\u00a0 The experiment could be as simple as measuring the volume of a liquid or as complex as measuring the width of an atom.\u00a0 Either way, if multiple scientists are able to get the same answer, the data is said to be reproducible and therefor to have scientific merit.\u00a0 On the other hand if they unable to arrive at the same result, then the resulting data is said to be “irreproducible” or “non-reproducible” and the data has no scientific credibility.<\/p>\n